a later thought

He etches a map to the next world

into his body with each breath,

imprinted as a tenderness

between his teeth-comb ribs

dislodging the dandruff

of his hopes.

He is beginning the ascent

from limbo, prayers paid

for permeable edges 

between the concentric

circles of life and death. 

Walking alien sidewalks

he spies on the wind

in its endless pursuit,

hears the name of the

lost child she is 

calling.

He absorbs the sterility

of a new world; cleanses

the mother tongue from his

language, discards the lint of

memory of a land

from between his toes. 

He is a snowflakes slow crescendo, 

one among many,

He is ascending,

and who knows if we survive 

by our small deaths?  

Disclosures

[excerpts from the epic letter I wrote to my siblings last year.]

Lately I've been feeling like there are variations of me floating around the world: full disclosures, half-disclosures, illusions. The more I think of them the more internal strife I have over the fact that, if I am not actually revealing myself then people are not actually loving or knowing me. I think I have grown so accustomed to the tearing back and forth between identities and beliefs and the scatteredness of my life/travel that instead of being a wholly united person I am fragmented selves that exist for certain people. I don't like that feeling. Inside of me is in motion. Africa is like this huge inhale that I don't know how to explain... so I won't get to that yet.

There are so many things I am afraid to disclose to others because of how it would effect our relationship, but then these nagging unsync'd versions of myself feel disingenuous and unsettling. I need disclosure... let people add me to prayer lists, shake their heads, I am seeking the Uncreated One as best I can, I am excited by my questions, passionate about the God who chatters and who is mysterious and beyond my reach, who I adore and ignore and am haunted by. I am also terrified of rending relationships, of the way certain parts of my ever-evolving beliefs may threaten others, may be inexplicable and simply unsync-able with others' worldviews... others who are important to me. But, these questions have come from every way I have chased after Jesus, and I'm sure God is not surprised or threatened by them. I don't want to be labeled by them, or told I am "abandoning the values of my youth". I fear how others would take this list and paste it as a wall between us.

I feel the corners of my body cringe at certain language, at ways of knowing God and while I can recognize the experiences are so powerful and real for them, I am struggling to find new ways to connect to a God who feels so present and so elusive and compels me to seek. I know it will be threatening to some because I feel the inward threat that my own questions provide to my faith- somedays I feel I'm losing it, other days I feel like I am being tackled by the lion- seized by great affection. I have to push. Perhaps its my nature. I have to wonder. I have to search for response. Messy, inconsistent, wrong, limited.

I have to keep disclosing what I believe-in-progress so people can continue to know me. Not what O think is the version that compliments them but me with integrity to myself, to my search and understanding of life, with hopeful doubt and joyful attentiveness, and I want others to feel free to do the same, and to hear and hold inside me their narratives, their relation to everything around them. For all of us to occupy the territories of our faith/experience/journey. The problem is, I have swallowed myself so often among certain people that the paths forked so long ago without them knowing that the ground to cover has so much explanation... five years, sometimes more... that I think they will rightly be shocked to discover, I am not who they think. I do not think what they think.

So, disclosures I would like to make, that I'm afraid to make, that I don't know how to make...

1) I'm okay with the idea that the world evolved, God exhaling a conversation, an unfolding, surprising universe-- and there are things about the world and the nature of God that I think make sense of this, and the more I learn of science (and evolution) the more wondrous and compelling and insanely complicated and beautiful I imagine God.

2) I don't think the Bible is a period, the end of God speaking, or even full revelation. I think it is a dialogue, a living thing, a book of a long history of people grappling for language that describes God, for a vocabulary that syncs their life to what they feel (and I think it falls short and evolves too), I think it invites us into the conversation, trying to find words that throw a hook into the real, tangible nature of God. It's a living thing... a relation to Truth as a person, it means so very much. and I think there are things outside the bible that tell us just as much about God.

3) Maybe in mysterious ways God is bigger than Christianity and Jesus incarnates the Way in ways I don't fully understand... more than just the C.S Lewis Last Battle scene... "and you may have been right, but not to what you thought. not to what you think. you have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out- perhaps a little at a time." "and how long is this going to take?" ... "I don't know. As long as you live perhaps." "That could be a long time." "I will tell you a further mystery, he said, "it may take longer." (Jayber Crow) ... I really can't grasp on to evangelical language at the moment, it just doesn't connect me to God at all, actually it makes me feel a little nauseated. I can't help but pursuing my questions, and I don't really care if that makes people think I'm less close to God because they're wrong.

4) I believe hell is empty and somehow Jesus leads grace, mercy, and unconditional love to ultimate victory. Which doesn't mean it doesn't matter if we know this Uncreated One, it just means I don't think eternal punishment triumphs, because to me that is a victory for darkness not God. (See: Raising Abel, Love Wins, etc.) 

5) I don't think homosexuality is a sin. And I will err on this side, because that's what I've come to and I'm part of the LGBT Safe Space club on my campus, and some of my closest friends are gay, and I support them. 

6) I think Jesus was non-violent and presents an example of self-sacrifice. And I think non-violence is important and redemptive.

7) I'm not a political label. And I don't think either label matters as much as people. Because I think people are holy ground and we need to keep listening, and never stop asking questions or think that the labels mean much. I like a boy who isn't a christian and right now I'm okay with that because I understand the mystery of spirituality and needing to puzzle through it and that God is broader. That the narrow path might just be balancing on the spine of a mountain, or a winding river.

8) I voted for Obama and I still would (or maybe John Paul) but I don't think McCain was dumb or evil, there's so much space for the ways we construct the world around us, so much need to see those ways and live by conviction to what we value and believe in. To live with conviction and humility.

9) I don't think everything is pre-destined. I think God is our companion in this journey and He has a plan and things are happening, unfolding... or maybe it's somehow both (God's beyond me).

10) Sometimes I swear, and its cathartic.

...The more I speak the more I want to spend a year in silence, and I'm sure there's more things, but that's probably enough to raise hell. Tell me disclosures! Not even things you think people should know about you, things you'd like to speak without fear... (these are things I don't want to just nail like 95 thesis to a wall, but things I want to stop hiding, to allow to rise to the surface as they may. for the leaves to fall). We need to talk. We need to keep asking each other questions.

I love you guys. Love, your lovely black sheep. 

after a year and a half this is emerging...

Mmhmm...

[Hopeland]

The embers of a bruised mango sun

draw shapes across concrete floor

And while we wash red earth from our feet

 I remember: "The Lord God formed man from dust"

Tongue carved into the arch of my mouth,

It was in tall grass with a skirt in serpentine twists

 that I buried god along with a calling

that had whispered to me as a child

A suit and tie told me doubt tastes

of lukewarm stale cola, but life grew wings

and song filled my veins with helium

kneeling into mama's dirt, I weed the poisons of holy books. 

It was in a street, filled with the skies burden

of rain, the hoarding of months,

that I was baptized into hopeful doubt

 Africa, you began all this. 

Tonight we sit on the porch clenching mugs

a last defense

and I confess my prayers lately have been:

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

She says, "Maybe Jesus is a leaf."

You aren't dead. You're reincarnated.

Mystery, mystery, mystery. 

I tremble to repeat it, fear and exhilaration. 

I sat an inch from a lifeless body

and discovered new hollows

for this ache too shallow

caverns, caverns 

No, I never told my mother

that I laid my Bible in a grave 

heart howling, shaking, finally exhaling. 

It was black skin that taught me joy,

that forgave my whitewashed sins.

***

And this, was the calm of the day: If Jesus is the Way, then Truth with a capital T lies in a person, and a relationship to Truth as a person is completely different than truth as a proposition. When you marry someone no matter how intimately you know them, they remain a mystery. And that is how Jesus/Truth will remain, intimacy and mystery.

Faith-in-progress

Spending this summer at a Unitarian Universalist retreat/learning center is wonderful-- and deepening my own faith in unexpected ways, renewing my awe at deep, deep grace. Each day here fosters diverse and lively conversation about truth, faith, religion, worldview, the common good, issues, justice, etc. -- passion that leaves me full of hope and also aware of my limited perspective. Perhaps one of the most important ways we journey towards God is through encountering others.

In encountering the spirituality and beliefs of others, I am learning how to occupy the territory of my own faith-- the on-going process of doubts, questions, and revelation. And being witness to the present wounds the lack of consistency between Jesus and we, the church, has inflicted is eye-opening, humbling, and convicting. A UU Christian writer recounted what I've been noticing, "The well, for too many UUs, had been irrevocably poisoned, and they would thereafter drink of the living waters from another source. Any other source, it seemed, but the Christian well." 

Being one of few here who worship God-in-Christ causes me to pay attention to how I marginalize others and how I minimize my own faith in my desire to find common ground. In some ways I feel less diminished or wearily labeled here, it is refreshing to not feel like God is in a box or to feel the tug of red, blue, hippy, evangelical, progressive, blah blah blah. (Especially because I so often feel pulled between identities.) In some ways, its like coming out of the closet, instead of feeling pressured to conform to a particular idea of Christianity, I feel only responsible for myself. And I am already curiously "different." Here there's just the terrifying (mercy-filled) weight of comparison to the Christ I am claiming to follow, the weight of integrity to myself.

The thing that matters most to me is consistency between the internal and external, a genuine expression not of rules, values, morality, or religion (though freedom is most often bounded), but of my own encounter with the Uncreated One and freely embodying my faith and worship. I think of social reformers, of priest, of theologians, who embody their faith in a way that is full of life, engaging, and not defensive. To live bravely and to speak with my own voice, my own conviction. That challenges me. 

* * *
The same writer I mentioned above, explained her path to "Jesus claiming her" this way... 
"Who is Jesus Christ to me? He is both a teacher of the Way, and the Way itself. For one who has always had a hard time grasping the concept of God, let alone developing a working definition of God, Jesus both points me toward a definition of God and then lives that definition. Jesus Christ is the freedom that laughs uproariously at the things of this world, while loving me dearly for being human enough to lust after them. He is my soul’s safety from all harm. He is the avatar of aloneness, a compassionate and unsentimental narrator of the soul’s exile on earth, and proof of the soul’s triumphant homecoming at the end of the incarnational struggle. He is not afraid to put his hands anywhere to affect healing. He mourns, and weeps, and scolds, and invites. He is life more abundant and conqueror of the existential condition of fear.
“By their fruits ye shall know them,” Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount. There are indeed degenerate branches on the tree of Christian life, but this does not keep me from Christ. There are even disagreements among Unitarian Universalist Christians about the appropriateness of this or that perspective, practice, or teaching—debates that I regard mostly with affection, if occasionally with irritation. We have so much else to do. My daily Christian practice, although it changes frequently and is augmented by wisdom and practices from other traditions, consists mostly of clumsy efforts to love my God with all my heart, all my mind, all my soul, and all my strength, and to love my neighbor as myself. That’s work enough for this lifetime.
I call myself a Christian because I am a disciple of Jesus Christ—not just Jesus-that-great-guy-and-teacher-with-the-long-hair-and-sandals but Jesus the living avatar of the great God and Jesus the Christ of Easter morning. ... When we (UUs) say that our living tradition draws from “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life,” I think of that original community of disciples, who had a direct experience of the risen Christ that I revere and respect. ... Do I believe, then, in the resurrection? I believe that the original community of disciples had a direct experience of one who was truly dead, and who soon thereafter sent them out to love the world, to serve, to heal, and to overcome the forces of hatred and oppression.

... And I am convicted."

when we killed the hemlock grove

In a labyrinth of trees, punctuated by flaming azalea and mountain laurel, our inter-generational Elderhostel group pauses at the base of a tree with dry branches. While the children shift restlessly, Liz, a naturalist who has dedicated her studies to the forests of this area explains the hemlocks are being killed by an evasive beetle species carried over on nursery imports from Asia. (This story could be told of Chestnuts, Fraser furs, Dogwoods-- tree species dying or already vanished from their native forests.) The death spreads quickly. A small boy crouching to doodle with a stick asks, "well why do they still let the plants come?" That is a good question. 
Money had been allotted to prevention, to research and policy for scientists and ecologists, funds ear-marked for the EPA and National Forest Service. September 11th changed many paths. The violence of innocent deaths that shakes communities through out the world erupted within America, September 11th.  In the aftermath, our grieving nation flew to the arms of the familiar companion of security with reckless abandon. Our fear carved a new path. The money was re-routed to the newly created Homeland Security Department where the millions of dollars disappeared into the impossible void of alleviating national fears and securing an insecure world. In the process, the American people surrendered their responsibility and freedom to an invisible hand promising the impossible security of an insecure world at the cost of certain freedoms. Slowly the trees die, disappear. It is all connected, our reasons, our greed, our fears, our priorities, and our blindness. Hemlock trees shade the ground cooling the temperature of the water, they are an irreplaceable part of the ecosystem.
Here in the Nantahala and West Appalachia we will probably loose 80% of these ancient trees, some over 500 years old. The water will warm and the trees will not be the only creation to suffer—following them will be trout, insects, and salamanders. The beautiful wood of the Nantahala forest will be another victim sacrificed to our madness, our fear. The desire to have whatever we want- trees from Asia, fruit in any season, parking lots and extravagant houses, everything on demand is another type of insiduous invasive species. The ghost forest whispers caution, dead branches drifting soundlessly, unobserved, joining the long history of forgotten species. Extinction.
            The voices rise to disavow our connection.  There is a protest to shouldering any blame, "this is not our fault, this is not caused by human hands—it’s the beetle’s fault." People like Liz, long familiar to these woods, watch the infection spread from tree to tree and their voices trail off into a silent respect for their role of witnesses to a great tragedy. They cannot convince us to bear it. We shake the responsibility off, in our comfort we will not look at the larger scope, foresight is only wished for in hindsight. The children scamper ahead full of bright energy while their grandparents tsk and amble after them. Liz and I linger for a moment, eyes on the trees.
The ghost trees gaze back at us, scrawny beings below their tall limbs, yet wielding so much power. They whisper, feeble hands reaching, trying to tell us, warn us-- our fears can kill us, our fears can swallow us whole. Fears of all shapes and sizes are still monsters—fear of the other, fear of responsibility, fear of the work of justice or conservation, of humility.
           And it is all connected. What we do not see nevertheless remains present. We stockpile weapons to destroy each other, to force our truths and defend our way of life against others with the same intention. Mother Earth groans, aching for the redemption of the sons and daughters of man. We scorch her with each other’s blood and slowly suck the life from her. Cut her, slay her, use her, rape her. Cut us, slay us, use us, rape us. We are reduced to this monstrosity against each other. Our harm a cycle of fear, a cycle of selfishness, of greed, an arrogant belief in our capability to fix anything and use whatever means we can to seek contentment-- yet our wants only lead to gasping desperation for more.
The hemlocks slowly dry, shrivel, decay, whispering of our power-- to destroy nations of trees, nations of ourselves. Life and death sit before the eyes of a child, but the child laughs and snaps twigs as he races after his friends. The wind howls low and mournful as we continue our descent, below us the waterfall weeps and yet still she offers us the body of her water. Throwing herself at our feet over and over with the gift of nature’s quiet comfort and peace. The sound envelops us like a mother trying to gather us in her arms, like a mother trying to warn us of the price of disregard.
        As Liz takes the role of guide, I set a pace between the children and their grandparents. I think of their shared history like the hemlock’s trunks, tree rings circling outward, encompassing the past. The trees and our grandparents have witnessed the birth and death of civilizations, of nations, they watch the children of man stumble over branches and now they wait. The grandparents slowly aging, still offering life to their grandchildren. As the trees slowly dying at our hands, still offering their shade. As we die at each other’s. If only we could learn the cycles of existing, of taking only what we need. But even now, I now greedily claim my space, I need to speak these words, be heard. Our fear of importance, our independence, our desire to do what we want, to be our own rulers and Gods lures us toward destruction-- at our own hands. 
It matters, not only for the trees, but because this way of the seeing the world is a way we see each other- as means, not ends, as commodities, as replaceable, exploitive, as if all things are ours and ours for the taking. This is the way we fail to consider the consequences, fail to recognize our impact, our bond and responsibility to one another. For community's sake, we must care about the environment; for the environment's sake we must build community. We need new eyes, deeper hopes, more daring ideas, and a bigger dream. Our rings must expand outward, encompassing more, growing to include communities, cities, nations within our concept of those we are connected too. The intensifying of individuality, of selfish ambition, the grandeur of a comfortable, luxurious life is wrong at the expense of others. It is. It is wrong like the death of Hemlocks. Their dry limbs thirst for our understanding—that our lives are interwoven, we are interdependent.  We stand to loose much. Too much.